The Revolutionary Spinoza - Immanence, Ethology, and The Politic of Desire

KRITIKE VOLUME ELEVEN NUMBER ONE (JUNE 2017) 197-217
Article
The Revolutionary Spinoza: Immanence,

Ethology, and the Politic of Desire
Raniel SM. Reyes
Abstract: This article is a reconstruction of Spinoza’s materialist

ontology using Deleuze’s philosophy, towards a revolutionary ethics
of desire. In the first part, I discuss the nature of Spinoza’s radical ethics
in conjunction with Deleuze’s immanent ethics. Moreover, I elaborate
Spinoza’s philosophy of ethology and notion of agency (conatus). In the
last part, I explain how these concepts have influenced Deleuze and
Guattari’s formulation of an immanent, minortarian, and collective
politics of desire. In addition, I explicate how this radical theory of
ethics can engender the diagramming of a nomadic politics or a
revolution-to-come.
Keywords: ethology, conatus, schizoanalysis, cartography
I. Spinoza’s Materialist Ontology and the Plane of Immanence
T
he philosopher, Deleuze describes in Spinoza: Practical Philosophy,
appropriates the ascetic virtues of chastity, humility, and poverty, and
lives it as the creative expression of his own singularity. 1 Spinoza
utilizes these virtues not to achieve moral ends or religious pathway towards
an afterworld, “but rather the ‘effects’ of philosophy itself … as there is
absolutely no other life for the philosopher.” 2 Meanwhile, in Expressionism in
Philosophy: Spinoza, Deleuze considers Spinoza as the ‘prince of all
philosophers.’ 3 This man deserves this noble description because he provides
“the best plane of immanence … the purest, the one that does not hand itself
over to the transcendent, the one that inspires the fewest illusions, bad
1 Cf. Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. by Robert Hurley (San Francisco:
City Light Books, 1988), 3.

2 Ibid.
3 Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. by Martin Joughin (New
York: Zone Books, 1992), 11.
© 2017 Raniel SM. Reyes

http://www.kritike.org/journal/issue_20/reyes_june2017.pdf
ISSN 1908-7330
198 THE REVOLUTIONARY SPINOZA
feelings, and erroneous perceptions.” 4 To be specific, Deleuze finds in

Spinoza the radical possibility of thinking and social existence emancipated
from the fetters of the State. 5 This can be perceived in the A Theologico-Political
Treatise, where Spinoza formulates a philosophy that critically appraises the
degenerate status quo. 6 For instance, he questions his fellowmen why they
choose their own enslavement and perceive it as freedom—a convergent
theme problematized by Deleuze and Guattari in the entire Anti-Oedipus:
Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 7
Spinoza’s audacity should not surprise us when Negri, in Savage
Anomaly: the Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics, considers him as the
anomaly of the century, “an anomaly of victorious materialism, of the
ontology of being that always moves forward and that by constituting itself
poses the ideal possibility for revolutionizing the world.” 8 Albeit life can
achieve a certain degree of optimization within a democratic or a liberal
society, the philosopher must not limit himself or herself with it. Following
Deleuze, “the philosopher solicits forces in thought that elude obedience as
well as blame, and fashions the image of a life beyond good and evil, a
rigorous innocence without merit or culpability. The philosopher can reside
in various states, he can frequent various milieus, but he does so in the
manner of a hermit, a shadow, a traveler.” 9 In this manner, dissonance and
nomadism are legitimized as cardinal virtues in Spinozist philosophy. In the
other works of Deleuze, these aforementioned virtues are analogously
conceptualized. In Nietzsche and Philosophy, he conceives the virtues of
affirmation and revaluation as the new values in the tragic world of Dionysus
that is liberated from the fetters of Christianity (transcendental philosophy). 10
A life characterized by fecundity and dynamism is termed by
Spinoza as Nature. This major Spinozist thesis hinges on the idea of a single
4 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and
Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 60.

5 If ever he speaks about the perils of a revolution, it is about the perdition and
disappointments of Cromwell’s revolution and the possible coup d’etat by the House of Orange.
In his words, “During these periods, ‘revolutionary’ ideology is permeated with theology and is
often, as with the Calvinist party, in the service of a politics of reaction.” Deleuze, Spinoza:
Practical Philosophy, 9.
6 Cf. Baruch Spinoza, A Theologico-Political Treatise in Works of Spinoza, vol. 1, trans. by R.
Elwes (New York: Dover Publications, 1951), 250.

7 Cf. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans.
by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1983).
8 Cf. Antonio Negri, The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics
(Minneapolis and Oxford: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), xvi.

9 Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 4.
10 Cf. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1983), 14-17.

ISSN 1908-7330
R. REYES 199
substance bearing inestimable modes of singularities and attributes, in the

same manner that it conditions the possibility of a plethora of becomings. 11 In
Ethics, Nature is understood as substance and cause (Natura naturans), and as
effect and mode (Natura naturata). 12 These two conditions allow us to talk
about Nature in general. Naturalism, in the context of Spinozism, satisfies the
univocity of attributes (where the attributes in the same form constitute the
essence of God as naturing nature and contain essences of modes as natured
nature); the univocity of the cause (where the cause of all things is affirmed
of God as the genesis of natured nature in the same sense that he caused
himself); and the univocity of modality (where necessity qualifies both the
order of natured nature, as well as naturing nature’s organization). 13
The philosopher John Duns Scotus shares with Spinoza the
fundamental belief that Being is univocal. Their ontological theorization of
univocity is a valiant antipathy directed to a long history of western
philosophical tradition systemically influenced by Platonic metaphysics or
transcendental philosophy. What Deleuze derives from Scotus is the idea that
it is only in univocity where genuine difference becomes possible. Deleuze
explains in Difference and Repetition that, “The essential in univocity is not that
Being is said in a single and same sense, but that it is said, in a single time and
same sense, of all individuating differences or intrinsic modalities. Being is
the same for all these modalities, but these modalities are not the same ….
The essence of univocal being is to include individuating differences, while
these differences do not have the same essence and do not change the essence
of being.” 14 Meanwhile, Spinoza treats univocal being with pure affirmation,
instead of neutrality or indifference, as it is “identical with unique, universal
and infinite substance.” 15 If transcendental philosophy erects a 38th parallel
between mind and matter, for instance, then they metamorphose as attributes
belonging to a single substance in the milieu of Spinozist univocity.
Spinozist univocity plays a very important role in Deleuze’s
formulation of the concept of immanence. Deleuze’s philosophy of
immanence is indispensably influenced by Spinoza’s ontology that is not
merely materialist, but also pantheistic, atheistic, yet ethical in nature.
Spinozist ontology is pantheistic because Nature and God are comprehended
as identically responsible for the productions of all affections. It is atheistic
since it denunciates consciousness, values and sad passions, and more
11 Cf. Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 7.

12 Cf. Baruch Spinoza, Ethics in A Spinoza Reader, ed. and trans. by Edwin Curley (New
Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1994), 57.
13 Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 92-93.
14 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. by Paul Patton (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1994), 36.

15 Ibid., 40.

ISSN 1908-7330
importantly, a Creator outside being. Lastly, it is ethical because Spinoza, in

Deleuze’s perception, opens us to a life of pure immanence: “We will speak
of pure immanence that it is A LIFE, and nothing else. It is not immanence to
life, but the immanent that is in nothing is itself a life. A life is the immanence
of immanence.” 16 Under a life of univocity, the world turns into a
democratized plane for all beings. Outside the Spinozist universe, the
philosophical theme of immanence parallels with Bergson’s notion of the
Whole (as constitutive of monistic time, infinite durations, and pure
virtuality) and Nietzsche’s tragic world of Dionysus. 17 For the former, the
Whole is a plane where space and duration, perception and memory, the past
and the present, recollection-memory and contraction-memory are
understood in the yardstick of virtual coexistence. 18 For the latter, the de-
deified world is a world of pure becoming whose governing principle is the
Eternal Return. 19
Deleuze explains that the title of the last chapter, “Spinoza and Us”
of Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, means being in “the middle of Spinoza.” 20
Precedent to Deleuze’s characterization of micro-politics as a “politics of the
middle,” is the recommendation that the most profound way to comprehend
Spinozism is by way of the middle. In his words:
Generally one begins with the first principle of a

philosopher. But what counts is also the third, the fourth,
or the fifth principle. Everyone knows the first principle
of Spinoza: one substance for all the attributes. But we
also know the third, fourth or fifth principle: one Nature
for all bodies, one Nature for all individuals, a Nature
16 Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life, trans. by Anne Boyman (New York:
Zone Books, 2005), 27.

17 Cf. Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam
(New York: Zone Books, 1988), 93. Like Spinoza, Bergson’s immanent philosophy offers a
critique of State philosophy. See Brian Massumi, “Translator’s Foreword: Pleasure of
Philosophy,” in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), ix.
18 Cf. Ibid., 91
19 Deleuze defines the Eternal Return as “the being of that which becomes. It is the being
of becoming itself, the being which is affirmed in becoming.” Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy,
48. A similar description can be seen in Difference and Repetition: “The eternal return is not the
effect of the identical upon a world to become similar; it is not an external order imposed upon
chaos of the world; on the contrary, the eternal return is the internal identity of the world and of
chaos.” Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 299.
20 Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 122. Being at the middle of Spinoza is analogous
to the Humean project of becoming-multiple. In Dialogues, Deleuze and Parnet characterize

Hume’s empiricist philosophy as a practical philosophy of “becoming-multiple, instead of being-
one, a being-whole or being as subject.” Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues, trans. by
Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 132.

ISSN 1908-7330
R. REYES 201
that is itself an individual varying in an infinite number

of ways. 21
A philosophy of the middle exhibits Deleuze’s radical reconstruction

of Spinoza’s monism. It is not simply a conservative asseveration of a single
substance, but rather a diagramming of a common plane of immanence
where all bodies, minds, and individuals are situated. 22 In this realm, the
“plane of organization or transcendence” and the “plane of immanence,” are
not perceived as dual opposites, but of a multiplicity of dimensions, lines, and
directions in an assemblage. 23 The former’s legitimacy emanates from a
transcendental sphere—a divine plan in god’s mind and an evolution in a
society’s organization of power. 24 The plane of organization always involves
genetic or structural subjectivity formations, which can only be inferred from
what it gives. 25 The plane of immanence, on the other hand, comprises of
innumerable collectivities, individuals, and bodies, subjected to multi-faceted
combinations or relations. Deleuze thinks that the plane of immanence is
Nature’s plane of composition.
In this regard, instilling oneself in the middle of Spinoza implies two
things. First, it entails Spinoza, including Deleuze’s underlying belief that
thought is devoid of any primordial origin whatsoever, but only of outside
by which it is connected; and, second, being in Spinoza’ middle means
situating oneself in the immanent modal plane. And since this plane is not
founded on any metaphysical principle, then relations forces and bodies are
defined in accordance to their material performances and variations, i.e. on
their ability to affect and be affected by other bodies whether by virtue of
cultivation or decomposition. The ceaseless transformation of the plane of
immanence, in Gaten’s view, “fragments the normative work of the plane of
organization which, in turn, refolds and re-expresses this undoing by
attempting to block and contain in molar forms the mobility and dynamism
of the molecular.” 26
“Immanence” is a very significant and overarching term in the entire
Deleuzian canon. 27 Deleuze’s theorization of immanence, greatly influenced

22 Ibid.
23 Cf. Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, 132-133; Cf. Moira Gatens, “Through a Spinozist
Lens: Ethology, Difference, Power,” in Deleuze: A Critical Reader, ed. by Paul Patton (Oxford:
Blackwell Publishers, 1996), 165.
25 Cf. Ibid.
26 Gatens, “Through a Spinozist Lens: Ethology, Difference, Power,” 165.
27 Immanence in the Deleuzian philosophy is interchangeably used with “empiricism.” In
relation to this, Vincent Descombes in Modern French Philosophy describes the project of Deleuze
as a quest for a transcendental empiricism. Cf. Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity: An

ISSN 1908-7330
by Spinoza’s nature, is perceivable in his anti-juridical position against State

philosophy. In Savage Anomaly, Negri ingeniously describes Spinoza’s
relationship with Deleuze as an “encounter with continuity,” which likewise
presupposes not only Deleuze’s, but also Negri’s profound indebtedness to
the anti-juridical philosophy of Spinoza. 28 The anti-juridical philosophy of
Deleuze is an appendage to his over-all criticism of transcendental morality—
the morality responsible for the marginalization of the materiality of life and
the creative potentialities of the body. Spinoza is a critical witness to this type
of morality prevalent in Western scholarship, especially in the juridical
tradition. In essence, juridical scholarship implies that “forces have an
individual or particular origins; that they must be socialized to engender
relation that adequately correspond to them; that there is a mediation of
Power; and that the horizon is inseparable from a crisis, war or antagonism
for which Power is presented as the solution, but the ‘antagonistic
solution.’” 29
Before Kant, Hobbes is one of the foremost prophets of
transcendentalism latently manifested in his social contract theory. For
Hobbes, the Power of the State is determined by its power of legitimization.
The State configures its legitimacy as a metaphysical guarantor based on the
rational individuals’ will (Leviathan). On the contrary, Spinoza asserts that an
individual’s natural right refers merely to his/her act of self-preservation
(conatus). Contra Hobbes, he argues that an individual’s conatus and man’s
rights are not transferrable to another, especially to a metaphysical
authority. 30 Similarly, in the Hobbesian territory, the only thing common to
each individual is one’s desire for self-preservation, especially when a
common object of interest exists. In this sense, it appears that the State’s
power is merely shaped by its actual capability or desire of self-preservation
that thereby voids the idea of arriving at a collective rationality, which is
nothing but a whimsical idea.
However, in order to distantiate Spinoza from the accusation of
anarchism, it must be made clear that he does not categorically negate any
effort of the State to harmonize individual relationships in the form of ethical
standards and public policies. What he opposes is the State’s project of
Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature, trans. by Constantin Boundas (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1990), 3. French poststructuralist thinkers, in the likes of Jacques Derrida, join
Deleuze in his search for a novel foundation divergent from the transcendental plane,
characterized by difference, constellations, and dislocations. Jacques Derrida, Writing and
Difference, trans. by Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 151.
28 See Negri, The Savage Anomaly, 3-21.
29 Aurelia Armstrong, “Some Reflections on Deleuze’s Spinoza: Compositions and
Agency,” in Deleuze and Philosophy: The Difference Engineer, ed. by Keith Ansell-Pearson (London
and New York: Routledge, 1997); Deleuze, Preface to Negri, Savage Anomaly.
30 Cf. Spinoza, A Theologico-Political Treatise, 214.

ISSN 1908-7330
R. REYES 203
advancing its totalizing and narcissistic interests using the ploy of achieving
communal cohesion under the authority of the Leviathan. 31 In other words, he
only repudiates all transcendental configurations that overlay on the
initiative of the multiplicity of a transcendent synthesis. 32 Against the various
juridical mystification of the State, he formulates a kind of immanent horizon
characterized by active forces, relations, and possibilities. Spinoza describes
the state as a product of a purely natural process, in consonance with the
cultivation of natural right and personal life. In this vein, the state’s
genealogical configuration is nothing but a product of secularized procedures
and struggles, and not of metaphysical or divine-laden processes. For
example, ethical relation and difference between bodies in the State are
defined not in accordance to an overarching transcendental principle. Rather,
the relation and distinction between bodies “relates to the kind of affections
that determine our conatus.” 33 In the study of ethology, the behavior of bodies
in the plane of immanence is governed by the power of self-preservation.
However, the numerous bodies’ perseverance entails a necessary encounter
with other bodies. It can be argued, therefore, that the aptitude and
movement of bodies may vary depending on the quality and quantity of other
bodies they associate with. Likewise, this creative encounter posits the idea
that even the power of self-preservation is not immune from the affections
from the exterior.
This characterization inspired Spinoza to re-configure democracy
under the rubric of materialism and production—the politics of the
multitude. 34 This mature phase in the philosophy of Spinoza, from the A
Theologico-Political Treatise onwards, constitutes a radical materialism of
bodies and surfaces where praxis constitutes being as an incessant
reconstruction by human praxis. 35
II. Ethology: An Immanent Philosophy of Agency
Spinoza’s materialist ontology is an ethology or an ethics situated in

the plane of immanence. In this plane, there is only a single immanent
substance: the human individual—a mode of nature’s attributes and a
31 For Deleuze, compact is one of the states of value judgments where individuals attempt
to unite with parallel bodies. Cf. Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, 257; Cf.
Armstrong, “Some Reflections on Deleuze’s Spinoza: Compositions and Agency,” 144.
32 Negri, The Savage Anomaly, 130.
33 Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, 261. In Ethics, Spinoza writes, “Each
thing, as far as it can by its own power, strives to persevere in its being.” Spinoza, Ethics, 159.
34 Cf. Ibid., xviii.
35 Cf. Ibid., xvii.

ISSN 1908-7330
fragment of a protean and interrelated whole. But it is important to accentuate

that in this plane, the individual does not enjoy a privileged position in
relation to other entities, in the same manner that subjectivity is not limited
to the realm of rationality. Univocity of being promotes an ontological
democracy, where everything metamorphoses into bodies, whose value is
gauged not according to one’s rational and discursive capacities, but on
speeds, as well as the ability to affect and to be affected. 36 The same
description is found in Deleuze and Guattari’s collaborative work, A
Thousand Plateaus, where they claim that in the study of ethology, bodies are
not defined according to some logico-biological categories such as genus and
specie: “It is no longer a question of organs and functions, and of a
transcendent Plane that can preside over that organization only by means of
analogical relations and types of divergent development. It is a question not
of organization, but of composition; not of development or differentiation but
of movement and rest, speed and slowness.” 37 Similarly in Anti-Oedipus, they
opine that ethology can be comprehended in the realm of desiring-
production. In this realm, a dichotomy does not exist between man and
nature, or the human and the nonhuman. Instead of perceiving them as
binary opposites, they are already perceived as part of a whole process of life:
“Not man as the king of creation, but rather as the being who is in intimate
contact with the profound life of all forms or all types of being, who is
responsible for even the stars and animal life, and who ceaselessly plugs an
organ-machine into an energy-machine, a tree into his body, a breast into his
mouth, the sun into his asshole.” 38
Furthermore, Deleuze explains how the concept immanence in the
Spinozist universe achieves an ontological status. Substance, attributes, and
the modes are understood in relation to expression, rather than to a
transcendent organization of emanation. 39 Substance is not privileged in
relation to any attributes, in the same fashion that no attribute is superior to
another. An attribute expresses a particular essence. As Deleuze argues, “The
essence that is expressed is an unlimited, infinite quality. The expressive

37 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 255; Cf. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition,
40.
38Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 5.
39Cf. Miguel de Beistegui, Immanence – Deleuze and Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2010), 47. The term “expressionism” in Deleuze’s Expressionism in Philosophy:
Spinoza originally bears an artistic French and German genealogy seen in the works of Artaud
and Bacon. As Macherey opines, expressionism opposes the “subtle distribution of impressions
over a horizontal plane on which they appear to float weightlessly … the vertical force of
expression revealed in the violence of utterances and gestures that present through more or less
systematically organized distortions the most strident aspects of reality and life.” Pierre
Macherey, “The Encounter with Spinoza,” in Deleuze: A Critical Reader, ed. by Paul Patton, 143.

ISSN 1908-7330
R. REYES 205
attribute relates essence to substance and it is this immanent relation that the
intellect grasps. All the essences, distinct in the attributes, are as one in
substance, to which they are related by the attributes.” 40
Meanwhile, in Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, Deleuze
elucidates the concept “expression” as double-edged hermeneutical device
that capacitates us to interpret texts, relations, and events, not limited to the
frontiers of representation, identity, linearity, and teleology. In
understanding history, for instance, we must not merely interpret it as a
linear progression of events towards a grand purpose or simply as a
culmination of a single Unitarian concept. Neither should we reduce it into
perpetual becoming. Craig Lundy’s History and Becoming: Deleuze’s Philosophy
of Creativity offers a profound articulation of Deleuze’s expressionist reading
of history. He interprets Deleuze’s philosophy of history as irreducible to
either historicism or nomadic becoming. This novel kind of historical
philosophizing does not conform to either aforementioned dualism, but
operates in-between. History as historicism and nomadic becoming, Lundy
writes, “will emerge in the middle to compose a productive composite or
differential history/becoming.” 41 Expression or expressionism dismantles the
logical stratification and arboreal scheme of things towards a relational and
minortarian reading (or the in-between) of understanding things, on a
parallel level of expression. 42 At the macro-level, being a Spinozist entails
embracing bare life in its concealed, unconscious, and marginal appearances
in the history of philosophy: “There is a philosophy-becoming which has
nothing to do with the history of philosophy and which happens through
those the history of philosophy does not manage to classify.” 43 Indeed, a
Deleuzian notion of immanence develops as a kind of creative heterogenetic
ontology that extends Spinoza’s concept of expressionism by depicting how
substance produces its very own modes and characteristics via a twofold
process of differentiation. 44
Ethology, moreover, is a philosophical perspective that does not
presuppose a reality beyond the contours of life’s materialities and is
irreducible to the epistemological regimentations of Platonic, Cartesian, and

41 Cf. Craig Lundy, History and Becoming: Deleuze’s Philosophy of Creativity (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 9.
42 In Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, Deleuze writes that, “The way Spinoza
understands the notion of expression … lies perhaps at the heart of his thought and style, and is
one of the secrets of the Ethics: a two-sided book, with its continuous succession of propositions,
demonstrations, and corollaries on the one hand, and its violent, broken chain of scholia on the
other.” Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, 337. See also Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical
Philosophy, 28-29.
43 Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, 2.
44 Cf. Beistegui, Immanence – Deleuze and Philosophy, 47.

ISSN 1908-7330
Kantian metaphysics. 45 Since metaphysics is the handmaiden of morality,

Spinoza’s ethology transforms as an antithetical and ontological ethics of
singularities and becomings. In addition, because the locus of morality is the
universal Subject or the mechanistic organism, ethology serves as a venue for
a micro-politics of the subject that focuses on the fissures molded from its
incessant relation to itself and to other assemblage of bodies.
Speaking of assemblage of bodies, the body assumes the position of
being the new model of philosophizing in the study of ethology. In Ethics,
Spinoza asserts that:
For indeed, no one has yet determined what the body

can do … from the laws of Nature alone, insofar as
Nature is only considered to be corporeal, and what the
body can do only if it is determined by the mind. For no
one has yet come to know the structure of the body so
accurately that he could explain all its functions …. This
shows well enough that the body itself, simply from the
laws of its own nature, can do many things which its
mind wonders at. 46
Spinoza’s adjuration to make the body as the new model signifies its
ability to surmount all our logical abstractions pertaining to it, including
thought’s capability to go beyond consciousness. Deleuze opines that, “there
are fewer things in the mind that exceed the consciousness than there are
things in the body that exceed our knowledge. So, it is by one and the same
movement that we shall manage to capture the power of the body beyond the
given conditions of our knowledge … and the power of the mind beyond the
given conditions of our consciousness.” 47 The various powers and
possibilities of the body can only be unleashed through perpetual syncretism
and struggles with other bodies. This inspires Spinoza to develop the concept
of agency.
The reason behind Spinoza’s formulation of agency is two-fold.
Historically, it seeks to revolutionize the decadent multitude of his time; and
philosophically, it aspires to antagonize the traditional or transcendental
notion of subjectivity that enormously shaped western philosophical
thinking. His philosophy of agency critically aims to salvage the body from
its marginalization in the history of western morality. Since the ancient times,
the body is subordinated to the logic of the mind or consciousness. Its
45 Cf. Adrian Parr, ed., The Deleuze Dictionary (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2010), 261.
46 Spinoza, Ethics, 155-156.

ISSN 1908-7330
R. REYES 207
contingent attributes such as corporeality and mutability are pondered as

debilities of the human condition without painstakingly exploring its great
and unrepeatable potentialities. Writ large, this historico-philosophical
violence depicts transcendental philosophy’s supremacy over immanence in
the entire western philosophical scholarship—ostensibly reflected in
morality.
Spinoza’s agency is integrally informed by the dynamics of
materiality of life. This radical attribute influenced Deleuze’s appropriation
of the concept of agency as something assemblagic and collective. A
Deleuzian appropriation of Spinozist agency deals the processes of
collectivization that produces composition or combination of individuals
with greater power and multiplicity, and individuals as modalities of these
greater individuals. 48 The encounter of agencies (bodies) may increase or
decrease their capacities and may craft novel or degenerate constellations,
affects, and intensities. Nietzsche calls this event as the experience of “chaos”
within oneself that not only entails one’s reflexive relation with oneself, but
also the rupture of one’s egoistic or transcendental-laden self as a pre-
condition to a life of becoming. 49 In the Spinozist human agency, the
individual is disposed to associate (actively or passively) with other bodies,
which will fortify his or her resilience. 50 Following Deleuze, “we experience
joy when a body encounters ours and enter into a composition with it, and
sadness, when …. a body … threatens our own coherence.” 51 In other words,
an individual agency’s mode of existence can be pondered as bad, servile, or
weak, if he or she is incapacitated to exercise his or her power of acting. And
it is to be considered as good, free, or rational when he or she exhibits his or
her capability for being affected wherein its power of acting increases and
strengthens, thus, crafting active affections and adequate ideas. 52
48 Armstrong, “Some Reflections on Deleuze’s Spinoza: Compositions and Agency,” 50.

49 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, trans. by Walter
Kaufmann (Penguin Books, 1966), 17.
50 In Deleuze’s view, passive affections are classified as a second level effect where “the
affections designate that which happens to the mode, the modifications of the mode, the effects
of other modes on it.” Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 48.
51 Ibid., 19.
52 Hence, a discussion on the characteristics of ethological relations inevitably brings us
back to the two fundamental questions of Spinoza’s Ethics according to Deleuze, namely, “What
must we do in order to be affected by a maximum of joyful passions?” and “What must we do
in order to produce in ourselves active affections?” The first problem heartens us to organize
relations and opportunities where bodies can be affected by a maximum quality and quantity of
joyful passions. But at the end of the day, we must realize that joyful passions are not enough
because the continuous production of joyful passions does not guarantee bodies’ full possession
of their respective powers of action. Rather than merely experiencing joyful passion, we must
search for the means in order to fashion within ourselves active affections—the main point of the
second problem. See Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, 273-274.

ISSN 1908-7330
Nevertheless, the complexity remains that creative and noble

consequences find no guarantee and transparency in a world of immanence
because there are no default attributes of the mind, body, and relations. 53
Since constellation of bodies may equally foster unwanted or debased
affections, Spinoza formulates the theory of common notions or compact in
order to regulate or condition life-affirming encounters and possibilities. 54
According to Deleuze, “When we encounter a body that agrees with our own,
when we experience a joyful passive affection, we are induced to form the
idea of what is common to that body and our own. 55 He suggests that with
the help of joyful passions, the idea of what is common to our own and the
bodies external to us are created. Meaning to say, agreement or unity between
two or more bodies is coextensive with utility.
When two bodies clash based on a common concern of preserving
their composition and scarcity of resources, they transform into enemies.
However, rather than interpreting this encounter of bodies event in a
Hobbesian fashion, Deleuze approaches this problematic differently. Two or
more bodies, he claims, must recognize that compact is in their rational long-
term mutual self-interest. 56 Gillian Howie, in Deleuze and Spinoza: Aura of
Expression, lucidly summarizes Deleuze’s reasons why is it that compact is in
the two bodies’ mutual self-interest:
First, all men have relevantly similar natures, these

natures are agreeable thus each will be affected with joy
in the encounter. Secondly, this means that the quantity
of active passions will be increased in each individual
and the individual’s power of action will be increased.
This is in the interest of each individual. Finally, the
individual bodies unite and through this third relation
compose a single body. Although each body is preserved
in the new combination, the new body is ‘twice as
strong.’ 57
53 In Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, Deleuze asserts, “But this is only our body in its own
relation, and our mind in its own relation, and the other bodies and other minds or ideas in their
respective relations, and the rules according to which all these relations compound with and
decompose one another; we know nothing of all this in the given order of our knowledge and
our consciousness.” Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 19.
54 The theory of common notions is an ethical activity that seeks to organize good
encounters, composing relations, forming powers, experimenting. Cf. Ibid., 19.

55 Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, 283; Cf. Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical
Philosophy, 55.
56 Cf. Ibid., 264; Cf. Gillian Howie, Deleuze and Spinoza: Aura of Expression (New York:
Palgrave, 2002), 145.

57 Ibid., 145-146.

ISSN 1908-7330
R. REYES 209
Moreover, such an adequate idea of the common notion allows us to

be in possession of our power of action, because “a mind that forms an
adequate idea is the adequate cause of the ideas that follow from it.” 58
Accordingly, a certain kind of “feeling which is a passion ceases to be a
passion as soon as we form a clear and [adequate] idea of it.” 59 In the wider
context of political relations, ethology seeks to render a basis from which to
rethink the political in a non-hegemonic or non-normative way that would
evade the reduction of variations or differences to relations of oppression and
domination. 60
The human individual, in the study of ethology, is configured along
two axes: kinetic and dynamic. In the former, the individual is perceived as
composite of other bodies and whose attribute is relational (speed and
slowness) in nature. In the latter, the individual is seen as a gradation of
power in the sea of other bodies that can affect and be affected by that
individual. 61 Similarly, the body’s identity is conceived as an open-ended
reality because of its unceasing dialogue with the exterior world. Since the
body is an immanent reality, its internal configurations depend on its
aptitude to affect and be affected by others. According to Deleuze, “a body’s
structure is the composition of its relation. What a body can do is the nature
and the limits of its power to be affected.” 62
The individual in the Spinozist philosophy is understood as the
complex organization of the existing mode in any attribute. 63 This mode bears
a singular essence, which is likewise a degree of power. Albeit characterized
by singularity, the individual’s essence is relational in nature. Deleuze
elucidates the potentialities of the body in terms of what Spinoza calls as
modes. As a kind of modality, the body is characterized by an essence
perceivable as a gradation of power containing various immanent parts. 64 The
single substance’s expression through modes only bears these parts by virtue
of its capability to affect and be affected in a particular relation. 65 Because the
modes are off-springs of endless relations, then it would simply diminish
58 Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, 283.

59 Ibid.
60 Cf. Rosi Braidotti, “Towards a New Nomadism: Feminist Deleuzian Tracks; or,
Metaphysics and Metabolism,” in Gilles Deleuze and the Theater of Philosophy, ed. by Constantine
Boundas and Dorothea Olkowski (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
61 Ibid., 27; Cf. Gatens, “Through a Spinozist Lens: Ethology, Difference, Power,” 167.
62 Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, 92.
65 Ibid.; Cf. Abigail Lowe, Intersections in Immanence: Spinoza, Deleuze, Negri (M.A. Thesis,
Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska, May 2013), 8.

ISSN 1908-7330
when it no longer contains this ability for they are themselves active
affections: “The mode passes into existence when its relation actually
subsumes an infinity of extensive parts … determined to enter into
characteristic relation … through the operation of an external determinism.
The mode ceases to exist when its parts are determined from without to enter
into a different relation, which is not compatible with the former one.” 66 In
short, the individual is composed of unlimited extensive parts. But these parts
are not constitutive of individual essences in themselves because they are
organized only on the basis of extensive determinism. 67 Despite the twin
possibilities of a body to decompose or strengthen itself after a certain
encounter with another, the fact remains that in every relation, there exists an
eternal truth, where “Nature in its entirety is conceived as an Individual that
composes all relations and possesses all the sets of intensive parts with their
different degrees.” 68
At this point, I must underscore that despite Spinoza’s radicalization
of metaphysics, he does not espouse the privileging of the body over the mind
or consciousness. His repudiation of the primacy of the mind over the body
does not want to fall into a vicious circle of privileging the body over the mind
just to give slavish justice to the former. Deleuze escapes this philosophical
quicksand by introducing the concept of “parallelism.” He opines that
parallelism “does not consist merely in denying any real causality between
the mind and the body, it disallows any primacy of one over the other.” 69
Ethics bluntly invalidates the conventional belief that the body’s activities and
attributes are merely dependent on the workings of the mind. Deleuze argues
that “what is an action in the mind is necessarily an action in the body as well,
and what is passion in the body is necessarily a passion in the mind. There is
no primacy of one over the other.” 70 His notion of parallelism demonstrates
that the body exceeds the epistemic registers that we have of it, in the same
fashion that thought exceeds the consciousness that we have of it. This is the
reason why Deleuze suggests that the traditional notion of the philosophy of
consciousness must re-think its hubris and blindness in relation to the body.
Consciousness is caused by determinate affections—the consciousness of the
conatus on the striving of things and man to preserve its being is produced by
affection towards joy or sadness, “and since the affections,” Deleuze
explicates, “are not separable from a movement by which they cause us to go
to a greater or lesser (joy and sadness), depending on whether the thing
encountered enters into a composition with us, or on the contrary tends to
66 Deleuze, Spinoza, Practical Philosophy, 76.

67 Cf. Ibid., 77.
68 Ibid.
69 Ibid., 18.
70 Ibid.

ISSN 1908-7330
R. REYES 211
decompose us, consciousness appears as the continual awareness of this

passage from greater to lesser, or from lesser to greater, as a witness of the
variations and determinations of the conatus functioning in relation to other
bodies or ideas.” 71 As a footnote to the aforementioned explanation, Deleuze
states that “One seeks to acquire a knowledge of the powers of the body in
order to discover in a parallel fashion, the powers of the mind that elude
consciousness, and thus to be able to compare the powers.” 72 Thus, the
principle of parallelism adheres to the univocity of being and aims for the
discovery of an “unconscious of thought just as profound as the unknown of
the body.” 73
III. Politics of Desire as a Cartography of a Revolution-to-come
At this juncture, I deem it necessary to construe the relationship

between Spinoza’s immanent ethics and Deleuze’s theory of desire. In the
domain of individual agency, desire as conatus illustrates the individual as
determined by its power to be both the subject and object of affection
“provided that we do not separate essence from action, a conatus can be
comprehended as the essence of a being or its degree of power. Actions
themselves constitute a person’s affirmation of life and his will to exist.” 74 In
Deleuze’s mature writings, the body (as conatus) becomes constitutive of
various desiring-machines. Desiring-machines are parts which are unrelated
to any whole connected to other desiring-machines, some within body, some
in the natural and the social world. 75 Contrary to conventional
psychoanalysis’ devaluation of desire, Deleuze and Guattari describe it is a
revolutionary force and social process of experimentation capable in crafting
connections and nomadic subjects that defy Oedipalization.
At the macro-level, Deleuze and Guattari stress in Anti-Oedipus that
desire or desiring-production cannot be divorced from socio-political
productions. 76 This gives merit to Smith’s recommendation in transfiguring
the relation between Spinoza’s ethics to Deleuze’s theory of desire into a
political concern. If the philosophy of transcendence symbolizes impotence,
degeneration, and enslavement, then a Deleuzian ethics would investigate
and analyze the conditions that engender people to desire transcendence or

72 Ibid., 18.
73 Ibid., 19.
74 Parr, ed., The Deleuze Dictionary, 266.
75 Cf. Ronald Bogue, Deleuze and Guattari (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), 91;
Cf. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 7.

76 Cf. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 68.

ISSN 1908-7330
oppression. The book Anti-Oedipus, as a philosophical product of the 1968

student protest, seeks to answer this political problem. In Foucault’s Preface
to the aforesaid book, he mentions three adversaries of Anti-Oedipus. Among
the three, he asserts that the most dangerous enemy is Fascism: “Not only
historical fascism (Hitler and Mussolini) … but also the fascism in us all, in
our heads and in our every day, the fascism that causes us to love power, to
desire the very thing that dominates us.” 77 The desire for transcendence
found in Deleuze’s early literatures transfigures into the desire for fascism or
domination in his mature writings. Based on the student revolt’s socio-
historical context, Anti-Oedipus actualizes as their critique of the French
people’s herd instinct or desire to be exploited, especially in the post-1968
era. 78 This enables them to conceptualize their immanent ethical theory or
politics of desire as an antagonism against all reductive psychoanalytic and
socio-political analyses that remain configured under the principle of
transcendence or Oedipality, towards the multiplicity of desire.
Deleuze and Guattari’s politics of desire is collective and
assemblagic—a micro-politics indispensably indebted to Spinoza’s ethology.
Despite Spinoza and Deleuze’s close affinity with Nietzsche’s anti-nihilist
philosophy, Anti-Oedipus does not epitomize solitary existence. As Mark
Seem elucidates in his Introduction to Anti-Oedipus:
Anti-Oedipus is not the superman …. Where Nietzsche

grew progressively more isolated to the point of
madness, Deleuze and Guattari call for actions and
passions of a collective nature, here and now. Madness
is a radical break from power in the form of a
disconnection. Militancy, in Deleuze and Guattari's
framework, would learn from madness but then move
beyond it, beyond disconnections and
deterritorializations, to ever new connections. A politics
of desire would see loneliness and depression as the first
things to go. Such is the anti-oedipal strategy: if man is
connected to the machines of the universe, if he is in tune
with his desires, if he is "anchored," "he ceases to worry
about the fitness of things, about the behavior of his
77 Ibid., xii.
78 In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari write, “For many French intellectuals, the
hyperactivism of post-May gave way to a mid-seventies slump, then a return to religion or
political conservatism in a foreshadowing of the Reagan eighties.” Deleuze & Guattari, A
Thousand Plateaus, xi.

ISSN 1908-7330
R. REYES 213
fellow-men, about right or wrong and justice and

injustice. 79
Deleuze and Guattari’s positive theorization of desire is an integral

factor in the conceptualization of the principle of “schizoanalysis.” Its
primary goal is to radically penetrate and dismantle the various
segmentarized concepts, zones, and relations already Oedipalized by fascism
or in today’s time, by advanced capitalism. The task of schizoanalysis, they
assert, “goes by way of destruction—a whole scouring of the unconscious, a
complete curettage. Destroy Oedipus, the illusion of the ego, the puppet of
the superego, guilt, the law, castration.” 80 More importantly, it aspires to
search for the unscathed deterritorialized constellations of desire or the
“flows that have not been reduced to the Oedipal codes and neuroticized
territorialities, the desiring-machines that escape such codes as lines of escape
leading elsewhere.” 81 In other words, schizoanalysis aims at emancipating
desire from being totalized by manifold and multifaceted expressions of
fascism or Oedipus. They believe that schizoanalysing desire can translate
into a radical politics that can instigate contemporary individuals and
collectivities to formulate multiple constellations, as well as to become
dynamic conduits of forces.
The politics of desire is a micro-politics. Briefly, Deleuzian
micropolitics composes of three intersecting lines, namely: the segmented,
supple, and the abstract line. The first line, rigid segmentarity, illustrates our
binary, linear, and circular condition in the society. 82 The second, the
molecular line, depicts supple segmentarity, since they are contextualized,
localized, and web-like. Deleuze and Parnet claim that molecular lines are the
cracks between segmentarities or minortarian fluxes with thresholds capable
of fashioning rhizomatic becomings and micro-becomings. 83 Lastly, the third
line is called the abstract line. It is a line capable of escaping segmentarities
and thresholds toward unforeseeable destinations and nomadic intensities.
The last line is the line of abstract detachment and absolute becoming or
deterritorialization. In sum, the three lines transverse each other across all
organizations, groups, and individuals.
Specifically, micro-politics is a quest for the nomad or nomadic line
that would spawn genuine and revolutionary transformation. When the
second line metamorphoses as the overarching principle of politics,
79 Mark Seem, Introduction to Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, xxv.

80 Ibid., 311
81 Ibid., xii.
82 Cf. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 209; Cf. Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues,
124.
83 Cf. Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, 124.

ISSN 1908-7330
instability is of high possibility. Of course, it cannot also be the first line

because segmentarity or segmentarized politics is the fortress of State
philosophy—the nomad’s nemesis. Does this entail then that the third line,
the abstract line, is the nomadic line? 84 In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and
Guattari opine that “from the viewpoint of micro-politics, a society is defined
by its line of flight, which are molecular.” 85 To avoid further confusion, we
must refer back to our primary characterization of the nomadic line as the
creative and radical symbol of transformation. In this manner, it appears that
it would be more suitable to delegate the nomad in the perpetually shifting
and amorphous space in-between the striated and the supple lines. 86 Micro-
politics rejects neither the first nor the second line; it stays in-between them.
Thus, micro-politics operates in-between the actualization of incessant
transformation, polysemy, and fluidity, as well as the creation of
organizations and collectivities, towards a mapping of a people and world-
to-come.
IV. Conclusion
Deleuze and Guattari’s politics of desire is vitally inspired by

Spinoza’s ethology. Ethology is not only an evaluative, but also a selective
principle—a cartography. In this sense, individual agencies and collectivities
are diagrammed in the plane of immanence, in such a manner that “a body is
defined only by a longitude and a latitude: in other words, the sum total of the
material elements belonging to it under given relations of movement and rest,
speed and slowness (longitude); the sum total of the intensive affects it is
capable of at a given power or degree of potential (latitude).” 87 A Deleuzian
cartography diagnoses the composition of an individual and collective bodies
through their extensive and intensive abilities, as well as their motion and
power of affects. Since bodies are a composite of many other bodies, which in
turn consist of other bodies, they may constitute the extensive parts of
broader socio-political assemblages, which likewise have their respective
characteristic intensive attributes. 88 In short, Deleuze’s cartography selects
84 In The Logic of Sense, the nomads are deemed as the pure abstract line that comes ‘from
the east.’ Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, ed. by Constantine Boundas, trans. by Mark Lester
with Charles Stivale (London: Continuum, 1990), 129; Craig Lundy, “Who are Our Nomads
Today?: Deleuze’s Political Ontology and the Revolutionary Problematic,” in Deleuze Studies, 7:2
(2013): 240.
85 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 216. Moreover, in the section, “Many
Politics” of Dialogues, Deleuze and Parnet appear to interchangeably use the molecular (supple)
and the abstract line or line of flight. Cf. Deleuze and Guattari, Dialogues, 130-4, 141-2.
86 Lundy, “Who are our Nomads Today?,” 243.
87 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 260.
88 Cf. Gatens, “Through a Spinozist Lens: Ethology, Difference, Power,” 168.

ISSN 1908-7330
R. REYES 215
bodies (individual, collective, political, aesthetic, economic, revolutionary,

etc.) and diagnoses them in terms of composition and decomposition.
Deleuze’s politics of desire implies a cartographic revolution. By
virtue of schizoanalysis, it must similarly diagram nomadic bodies and
relations whose desires escape Oedipalization. Since the plane of immanence
is characterized by expressionist agonism, bodily, and assemblagic
connections are always fluid. And because it is open to all kinds of
constellations, vigilance must always be at work, especially when
connections are disabled to foster creative lines of flight, as well as
adulterated or polarized by more subtle forms of fascism. In the light of
contemporary revolutionary praxis, cartography transfigures into a mapping
and selection of assemblages (a la Nietzsche’s philosophy of the eternal return
as an ethical doctrine) or bodies across cultural, geographic, and
epistemological distinctions, which are capacitated in dismantling existing
relations that fossilize movements, thwarts constellations, and reifies radical
action. But we should not be oblivious to the reality that in a post-control
society epoch where capitalism is already axiomatic and exponentially high-
speed, this task is like confronting the impossible.
Lastly, a revolution is a creative and rhizomic mapping constitutive
of a differential and cultural collectivity that is bereft of any fixed essence or
unitarian goal. A Deleuzian brand of revolutionary cartography is not merely
a reactionary brand of resistance like the Communist Revolution. It is because
it involves an epistemological rupture from our “old image of thought,” as
Deleuze explicates in Nietzsche and Philosophy, as well as the chaoticization of
our desire and relations totalized by Oedipus. If the term “purpose” or
“utopia” occupies any place in the discussion, it is in the form a differential
and self-reflexive principle that would guide and empower us to incessantly
create concepts capable of transforming the present. Even though there is no
guarantee that these concepts will engender more freedom in the future, and
that today’s revolutionaries would not metamorphose as tomorrow’s
conservatives or oppressors, we revolutionaries must not be discouraged in
untiringly laboring for a revolution-to-come. Borrowing from Deleuze and
Parnet:
Instead of gambling on the eternal impossibility of the

revolution, … why not think that a new type of
revolution is in the course of becoming-possible, and
that all kinds of mutating, living machines conduct wars,
are combined and trace out a plane of consistency, which

ISSN 1908-7330
undermines the plane of organization of the World and

the States? 89
Department of Philosophy
Research Center for Culture, Arts, and Humanities
The Graduate School
University of Santo Tomas, Philippines
References
Armstrong, Aurelia, “Some Reflections on Deleuze’s Spinoza: Compositions

and Agency,” in Deleuze and Philosophy: The Difference Engineer, ed. by
Keith Ansell-Pearson (London and New York: Routledge, 1997).
Bogue, Ronald, Deleuze and Guattari (London and New York: Routledge,
1989).
Braidotti, Rosi, “Towards a New Nomadism: Feminist Deleuzian Tracks; or,
Metaphysics and Metabolism,” in Deleuze, Gilles and the Theater of
Philosophy, ed. by Constantine Boundas and Dorothea Olkowski
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
de Beistegui, Miguel, Immanence – Deleuze and Philosophy (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2010).
Deleuze, Gilles and Claire Parnet, Dialogues, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and
Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987).
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
trans. by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983).
__________, What is Philosophy?, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham
Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
Deleuze, Gilles, Bergsonism, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara
Habberjam (New York: Zone Books, 1988).
__________, Difference and Repetition, trans. by Paul Patton (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1994).
Deleuze, Gilles, Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of
Human Nature, trans. by Constantin Boundas (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1990).
__________, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. by Martin Joughin
(New York: Zone Books, 1992).
__________, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1983).
89 Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, 147.

ISSN 1908-7330
R. REYES 217
__________, Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life, trans. by Anne Boyman (New

York: Zone Books, 2005).
__________, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. by Robert Hurley (San
Francisco: City Light Books, 1988).
__________, The Logic of Sense, ed. by Constantine Boundas, trans. by Mark
Lester with Charles Stivale (London: Continuum, 1990).
Derrida, Jacques, Writing and Difference, trans. by Alan Bass (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1978).
Gatens, Moira, “Through a Spinozist Lens: Ethology, Difference, Power,” in
Deleuze: A Critical Reader, ed. by Paul Patton (Oxford: Blackwell
Publishers, 1996).
Howie, Gillian, Deleuze and Spinoza: Aura of Expression (New York: Palgrave,
2002).
Lowe, Abigail, Intersections in Immanence: Spinoza, Deleuze, Negri (M.A. Thesis,
Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska, May 2013),
Lundy, Craig, History and Becoming: Deleuze’s Philosophy of Creativity
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012).
Lundy, Craig, “Who are Our Nomads Today?: Deleuze’s Political Ontology
and the Revolutionary Problematic,” in Deleuze Studies, 7:2 (2013).
Macherey, Pierre, “The Encounter with Spinoza,” in Deleuze: A Critical Reader,
ed. by Paul Patton (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996).
Massumi, Brian, “Translator’s Foreword: Pleasure of Philosophy,” in
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1987).
Negri, Antonio, The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and
Politics (Minneapolis and Oxford: University of Minnesota Press,
1991).
Nietzsche, Friedrich, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, trans. by
Walter Kaufmann (Penguin Books, 1966).
Parr, Adrian, ed., The Deleuze Dictionary (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2010).
Spinoza, Baruch, A Theologico-Political Treatise in Works of Spinoza, vol. 1, trans.
by R. Elwes (New York: Dover Publications, 1951).
__________, Ethics, trans. by Edwin Curley in A Spinoza Reader (New Jersey:
Princeton University Press, 1994).

ISSN 1908-7330

The Revolutionary Spinoza - Immanence, Ethology, and The Politic of Desire

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Revolutionary Spinoza - Immanence, Ethology, and The Politic of Desire

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

KRITIKE VOLUME ELEVEN NUMBER ONE (JUNE 2017) 197-217

The Revolutionary Spinoza: Immanence,

Abstract: This article is a reconstruction of Spinoza’s materialist

Keywords: ethology, conatus, schizoanalysis, cartography

I. Spinoza’s Materialist Ontology and the Plane of Immanence

City Light Books, 1988), 3.

3 Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. by Martin Joughin (New

York: Zone Books, 1992), 11.

© 2017 Raniel SM. Reyes

feelings, and erroneous perceptions.” 4 To be specific, Deleuze finds in

Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 60.

Elwes (New York: Dover Publications, 1951), 250.

(Minneapolis and Oxford: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), xvi.

Columbia University Press, 1983), 14-17.

© 2017 Raniel SM. Reyes

substance bearing inestimable modes of singularities and attributes, in the

11 Cf. Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 7.

University Press, 1994), 36.

© 2017 Raniel SM. Reyes

importantly, a Creator outside being. Lastly, it is ethical because Spinoza, in

Generally one begins with the first principle of a

Zone Books, 2005), 27.

to the Humean project of becoming-multiple. In Dialogues, Deleuze and Parnet characterize

© 2017 Raniel SM. Reyes

that is itself an individual varying in an infinite number

A philosophy of the middle exhibits Deleuze’s radical reconstruction

21 Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 122.

26 Gatens, “Through a Spinozist Lens: Ethology, Difference, Power,” 165.

27 Immanence in the Deleuzian philosophy is interchangeably used with “empiricism.” In

© 2017 Raniel SM. Reyes

by Spinoza’s nature, is perceivable in his anti-juridical position against State

29 Aurelia Armstrong, “Some Reflections on Deleuze’s Spinoza: Compositions and

© 2017 Raniel SM. Reyes

II. Ethology: An Immanent Philosophy of Agency

Spinoza’s materialist ontology is an ethology or an ethics situated in

33 Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, 261. In Ethics, Spinoza writes, “Each

35 Cf. Ibid., xvii.

© 2017 Raniel SM. Reyes

fragment of a protean and interrelated whole. But it is important to accentuate

36 Cf. Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 125.

© 2017 Raniel SM. Reyes

40 Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 51.

44 Cf. Beistegui, Immanence – Deleuze and Philosophy, 47.

© 2017 Raniel SM. Reyes

Kantian metaphysics. 45 Since metaphysics is the handmaiden of morality,

For indeed, no one has yet determined what the body

47 Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 18.

© 2017 Raniel SM. Reyes

contingent attributes such as corporeality and mutability are pondered as

48 Armstrong, “Some Reflections on Deleuze’s Spinoza: Compositions and Agency,” 50.

52 Hence, a discussion on the characteristics of ethological relations inevitably brings us

© 2017 Raniel SM. Reyes

Nevertheless, the complexity remains that creative and noble

First, all men have relevantly similar natures, these

encounters, composing relations, forming powers, experimenting. Cf. Ibid., 19.

Palgrave, 2002), 145.

© 2017 Raniel SM. Reyes

Moreover, such an adequate idea of the common notion allows us to

58 Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, 283.

62 Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, 92.

63 Cf. Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 76.

64 Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 76.

Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska, May 2013), 8.